New newbie

albi at scii.nl albi at scii.nl
Fri Aug 26 12:12:41 UTC 2005


On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 12:42:43 +0100
Stephen Bennett <stephen.bennett at pirok.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello everyone. From an extremely new newbie. I have a Ubuntu live CD 
> which is supposed to let me try out Linux before deciding finally to 
> ditch Windows. No matter what I do I can't get the thing to boot my 
> computer which is a Compaq Presario that I bought this year and which 
> has on it XP Professional.
> 
> Can anyone suggest something. Do I have a duff disk or is XP 
> particularly resistant. I've been through the help menu on the disk and 
> tried various ways of kidding my machine into doing it but have failed 
> completely. Although by no means an expert in these matters - and 
> certainly not in the league of most of the people contributing to this 
> list - I don't consider myself handless either.

is your BIOS set to try to boot from cdrom first ?
or have you been able to boot anything from cdrom in the past on that
machine ?

you would normally stick the cdrom in the cdrom-drive, reboot the
machine, and if the BIOS is set to try to boot from cdrom, then you
should be able to see the led on the cdrom-drive

is this what you've tried ? if so, what exactly is happening ? does the
ubuntu-live-cd attempt to boot at all ? are there any error-messages ?

did you try e.g. a knoppix-cdrom (http://www.knoppix.org) ?





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